Yahoo Opens Doors To Self-Cooled Data Centre

Yahoo Opens Doors To Self-Cooled Data Centre

20th Sep 11:11

Yahoo is opening a data centre in upstate New York that uses a radical new design to reduce energy costs by 40 per cent, the company said Monday. The centre in Lockport, near Niagara Falls, is cooled almost entirely by outside air that blows through the long halls to keep server equipment cool.

That means it doesn't need a chiller to provide cold water for cooling, avoiding one of the most energy-intensive pieces of equipment in a traditional data centre. The IT gear will be run primarily by hydroelectric power from the local utility, New York Power Authority. Yahoo says it's the most eco-friendly data centre it has built to date.

There are three halls attached to a central operations centre, with two more halls being built. The halls are angled toward the wind and are long and narrow to let air flow easily through them. They are shaped a bit like giant chicken coops, hence the name of the design: the Yahoo Computing Coop.

CEO Carol Bartz will open the data centre at a ribbon-cutting ceremony along with New York Governor David Patterson and US Senator Charles Schumer. Their attendance shows how important data centres have become. The US Department of Energy gave Yahoo a $9.9 million grant toward the cost of the facility. The DOE wants to encourage better energy practices in data centres, which account for a growing proportion of US energy use. The facilities accounted for 1.5 per cent four years ago, and the proportion has likely risen since then.

"For the past 60 years data centres were always this niche area that didn't evolve very much, they were pretty expensive and slow to build. This represents a major shift of turning the data centre into a highly efficient data factory," said Scott Noteboom, Yahoo's vice president for data centre engineering and operation.

Yahoo is also opening an operations centre in New York state and says it will create 125 full time jobs. Despite the reduced environmental impact, Yahoo's motives aren't all altruistic. By building a data centre that uses only 10 per cent of its power for cooling, versus half in some other data centres, Yahoo can slash its electricity bills dramatically.

It also steps up the competition with Google and Microsoft, which have been trying to outdo each other with more efficient designs. Yahoo said its data centre has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.08, compared to a national average of about 1.9. The PUE shows how much of the total energy to the facility goes directly to the IT equipment, versus other uses like cooling. A PUE of 2.0 means only half of the energy is powering the IT gear, and a PUE of 1.0 would mean all of it is.

The design is similar to one that Hewlett-Packard started building recently for large customers. Yahoo has applied for patents for its design, related to the layout and how air is circulated in the halls. "There's a lot of people chasing patents" in data centre design, Noteboom said.

Facilities like HP's and Yahoo''s are faster to build than traditional data centres. They're built from factory-made parts that are assembled on site. Yahoo expects to complete two additional halls at the Lockport facility in six months, compared to 12 to 18 months for a traditional data centre, Noteboom said. That will bring the total floor space to about 36,000 square feet, or enough to house 50,000 servers. The site could eventually support 100,000 severs with additional halls added, Noteboom said.

The facility cost less to build than a traditional data centre, said Christina Page, director of Yahoo's energy and climate strategy. "There's an assumption that green costs more to build, but a lot of those assumptions aren't always correct," she said. The servers inside are "off the shelf" products housed in standard racks, but Yahoo is also experimenting with its own server designs. On days when the weather is too hot for fresh-air cooling, the data centre will use an evaporative cooling system. "We can use fresh air the vast majority of the year," Noteboom said.

Yahoo wouldn't say how much it is paying for the hydro power but Page said it's wrong to assume that renewable energy always cost more than power from coal-fired plants. The design allows the temperature and airflow inside to be closely controlled, like a data centre in a shipping container but on a larger scale. "To me the Yahoo Computing Coop is just a bigger container," Noteboom said.